Trouble on Her Doorstep

‘Actually, he did. But he chose not to use it.’ Sean sighed. ‘I found it still in the original packaging in his office desk this afternoon.’

‘Ah ha. Black mark for Team Beresford Hotels. Time for some staff training, methinks.’

‘That’s why I am back in London, Miss Flynn.’ Sean bristled and put away his phone and started refastening his remaining coat buttons. ‘To make sure that this sort of mistake does not happen again. I will personally arrange to have your deposit refunded tomorrow so you can organize a replacement venue at your convenience.’

She looked at him for a second then took another swig of very dark tea before lowering her large china beaker to the table. Then she stood up, stretched and folded her arms.

‘Which part of “I am not cancelling” did you not understand? I don’t want my deposit back. I want my conference suite. No, that’s not quite right.’ Her eyebrows squeezed tight together. ‘I need my conference room. And you...’ she smiled up at him and fluttered her eyelashes outrageously ‘...are going to make sure I get it.’

Sean sighed, long and low. ‘I thought that I had made it clear. The conference facilities at the Richmond Square had already been reserved for over a year before Frank accepted your booking. There are four hundred and fifty business leaders arriving from all over the world for one of the most prestigious environmental strategy think-tank meetings outside Davos. Four days of high-intensity, high-profile work.’

‘Double-booked. Yes. I understand. But here is the thing, Sean; you don’t mind if I call you Sean, do you? Excellent. The lovely Frank made my copies of all of those forms I signed on his very handy hotel photocopier and, as far as I know, my contract is with the Beresford hotel group. And that means that you have to find me an alternative venue.’

‘But that is quite impossible at this short notice.’

And then he did it.

He looked at her with the same kind of condescending and exasperated expression on his face as her high school headmistress had used when she’d turned up for her first big school experience in London after spending the first fifteen years of her life travelling around tea-growing estates in India with her parents.

‘Poor child,’ she had heard the teacher whisper to her assistant. ‘She doesn’t understand the complicated words that we are using. Shame that she has no chance in the modern educational system. It’s far too late for her to catch up now and get the qualifications she needs. What a pity she has no future.’

A cold shiver ran down Dee’s back just at the memory of those words. If only that teacher knew that she had lit a fire inside her belly to prove just how wrong she had been to write her off as a hopeless case just because she had been outside the formal school system. And that fire was still burning bright. In fact, at this particular moment it was hot enough to warm half the city and certainly hot enough to burn this man’s fingers if he even tried to get in her way.

This man who had fallen into her tea rooms uninvited was treating her like a child who had to be tolerated, patted on the head and told to keep quiet while the grown-ups decided what was going to happen to her without bothering to ask her opinion.

This handsome man in a suit didn’t realize that he was doing it.

And the hair on the back of her neck flicked up in righteous annoyance.

She had never asked to come to London. Far from it. And what had been her reward for being uprooted from the only country that she had called home?

Oh yes. Being ridiculed on a daily basis by the other pupils because of her strange clothes and her Anglo-Indian accent, and then humiliated by the teachers because she had no clue about exam curricula and timetables and how to use the school desktop computers. Why should she have? That had never been her life.

And of course she hadn’t been able to complain to her lovely parents. They were just as miserable and had believed that they were doing the right thing, coming back to Britain for the big promotion and sending her to the local high school.

Well, that was then and this was now.

The fifteen-year-old Dee had been helpless to do anything about it but work hard and try to get through each day as best as she could.

But she certainly did not have to take it now. She had come a long way from that quiet, awkward teenager and worked so very hard to put up with anything less than respect.

Maybe that was why she stepped forward and glared up into his face so that he had to look down at her before he could reply.

‘Exactly. There is no way that I could find another hotel that can cope with three hundred international tea specialists less than two weeks before the festival. Everywhere will be booked well ahead, even in February.’

She lifted her cute little chin and stared him out. ‘Here is a question for you: would you mind reminding me exactly how many hotels the Beresford hotel group runs in London? Because they seem to be popping up everywhere I look.’

‘Five,’ he replied in a low voice.

‘Five? Really? That many? Congratulations. Well, in that case it shouldn’t be any trouble for you to find me a replacement conference room in one of the four other hotels in our fine city. Should it?’ she said in a low, hoarse voice, her eyes locked onto his. And this time she had no intention of looking away first.

The air between them was so thick with electricity that she could have cut it with a cake knife. Time seemed to stretch and she could see the muscles in the side of his face twitching with suppressed energy, as though he could hardly believe that she was challenging him.

Because she had no intention whatsoever of giving in.

No way was she going to allow Sean Used-to-having-his-own-way Beresford to treat her like a second-class citizen.

And the sooner he realized that, the better!

* * *

Sean felt the cold ferocity of those pale-green eyes burn like frostbite onto his cheeks, and was just about to tell her what an impossible task that was when there was an explosion of noise and movement from behind his back. What seemed like a coach party of women of all shapes and ages burst out into the tea rooms, laughing like trains, gossiping and competing with one another in volume and pitch to make their voices heard above the uproar.

It felt like a tsunami of women was bearing down on him.

All carrying huge bags bursting with what looked like cake tins and mystery utensils and binders. Sean stepped back and practically squeezed himself against one wall to let the wall of female baking power sweep past him towards the entrance and out into the street.

‘Ah, Lottie. There you are!’ Dee Flynn cried out and grabbed the sleeve of a very pretty slim blonde dressed in a matching navy T-shirt and trousers. ‘Sorry I did not get back to serve more tea. Come and meet Sean. The London Festival of Tea is going to have a new exciting venue and Sean here is the man who is in charge of finding the perfect location. And he is not going to rest until he has found the perfect replacement.’

She grinned at him with an expression of pure delight, with an added twist of evil. ‘Aren’t you, Sean?’

THREE

Tea, glorious tea. A celebration of teas from around the world.

There are many different kinds of tea, but they are all derived from just one type of plant: Camellia sinensis. The colour and variety of the tea (green, black, white and oolong) depends on the way the leaves are treated once they are picked.

From Flynn’s Phantasmagoria of Tea

Wednesday

‘So how are you enjoying being back in London?’ Rob Beresford’s voice echoed out from the computer screen in his usual nonchalant manner. His eyebrows lifted. ‘Same old madness?’

‘Nothing that boring.’ Sean snorted and pointed to the bags under his eyes. ‘Still shattered. Still jet-lagged. Still wading through the mess Frank Evans got himself into at Richmond Square. I still can’t believe that the man we trusted to run our hotel just took off and left this disaster for someone else to sort out.’

Sean’s half-brother sat back in his chair and gave a low cough. ‘Now, who does that remind me of? Oh yes, your ex-girlfriend. I caught up with the lovely Sasha at the catering-strategy forum last week. She asked me to say hi, by the way. Now, wasn’t that sweet? Considering that she dumped you with zero notice. I could almost dislike her if it wasn’t for her fantastic figure.’ Rob gave a low, rough sigh. ‘And that tan... She’s looking good, brother. The Barbados hotel seems to be suiting her very nicely and the clients love her.’

‘Thanks for the update.’ Sean coughed and then squinted towards the computer screen. ‘And she did not dump me. It simply wasn’t working out for either of us. Trying to co-ordinate our diaries so that we were in the same time zone for more than a few days had stopped being funny a long time before we called it a day. You know what chaos it was last year! You were there, working the same hours as I was.’

Sean turned back to shuffling through a file on the desk. Sasha had been on the fast-track Beresford Hotels management programme and he had been working so hard that he hadn’t even noticed that they barely saw one another face to face any more.

Until he’d come back to her apartment at one a.m., exhausted after two weeks on the road solving all the teething problems for a hotel opening, to find Sasha sitting waiting for him.

He had just missed her birthday dinner, the one he had promised that he would be there for. Not even the private jet could fly in tropical storms.

It was a pity that it hadn’t been the first time that he’d missed her birthday. They had both worked like crazy over the Christmas and New Year holiday, but February should have been down time. Until the new hotel they were opening in Mexico had flooded only days before the grand opening and a holiday became a distant memory.

They had talked through the night but in the end there had been no escaping the truth. He was the operations troubleshooter and Tom Beresford’s son. It was his job to be on stand-by and cope with emergencies. No matter what else was happening in his life. Or who. And she’d wanted more than he was prepared to give her.